Crazy Password Demands

I’ve had it. This is getting insane now. For some time I’ve taken issue with websites that place demands on my passwords and think they’re doing me some favor by enforcing these. The only thing they’re doing is forcing me to have dozens of different passwords that I can’t recall.

My Yahoo account has a very short password that’s many years old. This morning I had to try to recover a password from another account and instead it wanted me to just create a new one. No problem except then it started with the BS. It has to be at least x characters long. It has to contain at least a letter and a number. It has to contain at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter. I tried for 20 minutes to get a valid password accepted. It has other restrictions. It can’t contain your name, your username and other limitations. I now have NO idea what password I just picked. I didn’t mind that because…..

Here’s the really stupid part. To get full access to the account all I needed to know was the username and the birthdate associated with it. Now what sense does that make? All this security when all I need is two readily available pieces of information?

Dell then did the same thing to me when I went to set up an account to access support forums for a new laptop I bought from them. Different rules but close. Another account insisted I include one special character—ONE and one only.

It’s my data. Ask me to agree to a legal document letting you off the hook for any lose of my data and be done with it. If I want a 2-character password then that’s on me. There’s nothing in my Dell support posts or Yahoo e-mail that I care to protect. Stop trying to protect me more than I want to be protected.